We Wuz Robbed! Not Cool to Lift Our Content

Every now and then, we check the great big interwebs to see what’s being said about us, mainly to see what articles are most popular and to see how we can continue to help ya’ll with your apt searches. Every now and then, though, we see something less pleasant — folks who are just lifting our content.

You probably know this already, but our content is original and it’s copyrighted, so reusing it without permission isn’t just not cool…in fancy legalese it’s called copyright infringement. Yikes, indeed!

So, you can imagine our surprise when our latest search revealed that five of our articles were posted without attribution or permission on a major state university’s website. When contacted, we were in for a second surprise — the university had received the articles from ANOTHER major university. It became clear that the articles were good ol’ cut-and-paste jobs by a student working at the university’s Student Money Management Center, and the staff had no idea that the content was plagiarized. Both universities have since removed our content and are giving us links instead, so all is forgiven, but. . . ouch.

Now, we are huge supporters of all schools and non-profits, so if you are one of those and want to share our content with your community, drop us a note with the details and if it looks legit, we’ll be happy to give you a permission for reuse. We’re not asking for $$ — we’d just like a bit of credit for all our apt efforts.

And hey all you students, if you spot our content on your school’s site, without a link back to us, drop us a note or post a comment. We’ll investigate!